1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to apparatus and methods for arbitrating access of a plurality of data processing devices to a common data processing resource. More particularly, the present invention relates to an arbitrator which locks out other data processing devices in favor of a device exhibiting specific behavior.
2. Art Background
In the computing industry, it is quite common to transfer data and commands between a plurality of data processing devices ("agents"), such as for example, computers, and a variety of data processing resources (e.g. a system bus, printer, memory, etc.). In order to avoid chaos, some arbitration means must be utilized to allocate access to the common resource by the agents in an orderly fashion. For example, one agent may transmit messages and/or data packets to another agent along a bus while other agents may concurrently require bus access in order to execute other data processing operations. The bus arbitrator determines which agent shall be permitted access to the bus and what order other agents awaiting bus access will acquire ownership.
Historically, arbitration devices have allocated access using a variety of predetermined hierarchies of priority. For example, some arbitrators utilize a system in which access is a direct function of the order in which the requests are received from the agents. Other systems incorporate priority levels for access, and each agent is assigned a particular priority value. Generally, existing arbitration systems attempt to achieve a level of "fairness" which insures that no one agent may dominate the resource and thereby starve other agents having lower priority levels.
Existing arbitration systems generally work well where agents transmit relatively long messages or only require access occasionally. In those instances where repetitive and sequential high speed burst transmissions from one agent to another occur, relatively large amounts of time are wasted during the transfer of resource ownership from one agent to another between transmissions. As will be described, the present invention provides an arbitration system which has the capability of locking out access by other agents, and thereby permitting only a single or selected agents to gain ownership of the resource based on recent transmission history. Using the present invention, faster data processing devices achieve a higher level of performance for multiple burst transmissions, since the time required for reallocating resource ownership between burst transmissions is eliminated.